A story could start almost anywhere. This one begins at a moment startled by a rocket.

In the autumn of 1957, America was not at war ... or at peace. The threat of nuclear annihilation shadowed every day, flickering with visions of the apocalyptic. In classrooms, “duck and cover” drills were part of the curricula. Underneath any Norman Rockwell painting, the grim reaper had attained the power of an ultimate monster.

Dwight Eisenhower was most of the way through his fifth year in the White House. He liked to speak reassuring words of patriotic faith, with presidential statements like: “America is the greatest force that God has ever allowed to exist on His footstool.” Such pronouncements drew a sharp distinction between the United States and the Godless Communist foe.

But on October 4, 1957, the Kremlin announced the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. God was supposed to be on America’s side, yet the Soviet atheists had gotten to the heavens before us. Suddenly the eagle of liberty could not fly nearly so high.

Sputnik was instantly fascinating and alarming. The American press swooned at the scientific vistas and shuddered at the military implications. Under the headline “Red Moon Over the U.S.,” Time quickly explained that “a new era in history had begun, opening a bright new chapter in mankind’s conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the cold war.” The newsmagazine was glum about the space rivalry: “The U.S. had lost its lead because, in spreading its resources too thin, the nation had skimped too much on military research and development.”

The White House tried to project calm; Eisenhower said the satellite “does not raise my apprehension, not one iota.” But many on the political spectrum heard Sputnik’s radio pulse as an ominous taunt.

A heroine of the Republican right, Clare Boothe Luce, said the satellite’s beeping was an “outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority.” Newspaper readers learned that Stuart Symington, a Democratic senator who’d been the first secretary of the air force, “said the Russians will be able to launch mass attacks against the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles within two or three years.”

A New York Times article matter-of-factly referred to “the mild
panic that has seized most of the nation since Russia’s sputnik was
launched two weeks ago.” In another story, looking forward, Times
science reporter William L. Laurence called for bigger pots of gold at
the end of scientific rainbows: “In a free society such as ours it is
not possible ‘to channel human efforts’ without the individual’s
consent and wholehearted willingness. To attract able and promising
young men and women into the fields of science and engineering it is
necessary first to offer them better inducements than are presently
offered.”

At last, in early February 1958, an American satellite
— the thirty-pound Explorer — went into orbit. What had succeeded in
powering it into space was a military rocket, developed by a U.S. Army
research team. The head of that team, the rocket scientist Wernher von
Braun, was boosting the red-white-and-blue after the fall of his
ex-employer, the Third Reich. In March 1958 he publicly warned that the
U.S. space program was a few years behind the Russians.

Soon after dusk, while turning a skate key or playing with a hula
hoop, children might look up to see if they could spot the bright light
of a satellite arching across the sky. But they could not see the
fallout from nuclear bomb tests, underway for a dozen years by 1958.
The conventional wisdom, reinforced by the press, downplayed fears
while trusting the authorities; basic judgments about the latest
weapons programs were to be left to the political leaders and their
designated experts.

On the weekly prime-time Walt Disney
television show, an animated fairy with a magic wand urged youngsters
to drink three glasses of milk each day. But airborne strontium-90 from
nuclear tests was falling on pastures all over, migrating to cows and
then to the milk supply and, finally, to people’s bones. Radioactive
isotopes from fallout were becoming inseparable from the human diet.

Young
people — dubbed “baby boomers,” a phrase that both dramatized and
trivialized them — were especially vulnerable to strontium-90 as their
fast-growing bones absorbed the radioactive isotope along with calcium.
The children who did as they were told by drinking plenty of milk ended
up heightening the risks — not unlike their parents, who were
essentially told to accept the bomb fallout without complaint.

Under
the snappy rubric of “the nuclear age,” the white-coated and loyal
American scientist stood as an icon, revered as surely as the
scientists of the enemy were assumed to be pernicious. And yet the
mutual fallout, infiltrating dairy farms and mothers’ breast milk and
the bones of children, was a type of subversion that never preoccupied
J. Edgar Hoover.

The more that work by expert scientists
endangered us, the more we were informed that we needed those
scientists to save us. Who better to protect Americans from the hazards
of the nuclear industry and the terrifying potential of nuclear weapons
than the best scientific minds serving the industry and developing the
weapons?

In June 1957 — the same month Nobel Prize–winning
chemist Linus Pauling published an article estimating that ten thousand
cases of leukemia had already occurred due to U.S. and Soviet nuclear
testing — President Eisenhower proclaimed that the American detonations
would result in nuclear warheads with much less radioactivity. Ike said
that “we have reduced fallout from bombs by nine-tenths,” and he
pledged that the Nevada explosions would continue in order to “see how
clean we can make them.” The president spoke just after meeting with
Edward Teller and other high-powered physicists. Eisenhower assured the
country that the scientists and the U.S. nuclear test operations were
working on the public’s behalf. “They say: ‘Give us four or five more
years to test each step of our development and we will produce an
absolutely clean bomb.’”

But sheer atomic fantasy, however
convenient, was wearing thin. Many scientists actually opposed the
aboveground nuclear blasts. Relying on dissenters with a range of
technical expertise, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson had made an
issue of fallout in the 1956 presidential campaign. During 1957 — a
year when the U.S. government set off thirty-two nuclear bombs over
southern Nevada and the Pacific — Pauling spearheaded a global petition
drive against nuclear testing; by January 1958 more than eleven
thousand scientists in fifty countries had signed.

Clearly, the
views and activities of scientists ran the gamut. But Washington was
pumping billions of tax dollars into massive vehicles for scientific
research. These huge federal outlays were imposing military priorities
on American scientists without any need for a blatant government
decree.

What was being suppressed might suddenly pop up like some kind of
jack-in-the-box. Righteous pressure against disruptive or “un-American”
threats was internal and also global, with a foreign policy based on
containment. Control of space, inner and outer, was pivotal. What could
not be controlled was liable to be condemned.

The ’50s and early
’60s are now commonly derided as unbearably rigid, but much in the era
was new and stylish at the time. Suburbs boomed along with babies.
Modern household gadgets and snazzier cars appeared with great
commercial fanfare while millions of families, with a leg up from the
GI Bill, climbed into some part of the vaguely defined middle class.
The fresh and exciting technology called television did much to turn
suburbia into the stuff of white-bread legends — with scant use for the
less-sightly difficulties of the near-poor and destitute living in
ghettos or rural areas where the TV lights didn’t shine.

On the
surface, most kids lived in a placid time, while small screens showed
entertaining images of sanitized life. One among many archetypes came
from Betty Crocker cake-mix commercials, which were all over the tube;
the close-ups of the icing could seem remarkable, even in black and
white. Little girls who had toy ovens with little cake-mix boxes could
make miniature layer cakes.

Every weekday from 1955 to 1965 the
humdrum pathos of women known as housewives could be seen on Queen for
a Day. The climax of each episode came as one of the competitors, often
sobbing, stood with a magnificent bouquet of roses suddenly in her
arms, overcome with joy. Splendid gifts of brand-new refrigerators and
other consumer products, maybe even mink stoles, would elevate bleak
lives into a stratosphere that America truly had to offer. The show
pitted women’s sufferings against each other; victory would be the just
reward for the best, which was to say the worst, predicament. The final
verdict came in the form of applause from the studio audience, measured
by an on-screen meter that jumped with the decibels of apparent empathy
and commiseration, one winner per program. Solutions were individual.
Queen for a Day was a nationally televised ritual of charity, providing
selective testimony to the goodness of society. Virtuous grief, if
heartrending enough, could summon prizes, and the ecstatic weeping of a
crowned recipient was vicarious pleasure for viewers across the
country, who could see clearly America’s bounty and generosity.

That
televised spectacle was not entirely fathomable to the baby-boom
generation, which found more instructive role-modeling from such media
fare as The Adventures of Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and
other aspects of the Mickey Mouse Club show — far more profoundly
prescriptive than descriptive. By example and inference, we learned how
kids were supposed to be, and our being more that way made the media
images seem more natural and realistic. It was a spiral of
self-mystification, with the authoritative versions of childhood
green-lighted by network executives, producers, and sponsors. Likewise
with the sitcoms, which drew kids into a Potemkin refuge from whatever
home life they experienced on the near side of the TV screen.

Dad
was apt to be emotionally aloof in real life, but on television the
daddies were endearingly quirky, occasionally stern, essentially
lovable, and even mildly loving. Despite the canned laugh tracks, for
kids this could be very serious — a substitute world with obvious
advantages over the starker one around them. The chances of their
parents measuring up to the moms and dads on Ozzie and Harriet or
Father Knows Best were remote. As were, often, the real parents. Or at
least they seemed real. Sometimes.

Father Knows Best aired on
network television for almost ten years. The first episodes gained
little momentum in 1954, but within a couple of years the show was one
of the nation’s leading prime-time psychodramas. It gave off warmth
that simulated intimacy; for children at a huge demographic bulge,
maybe no TV program was more influential as a family prototype.

But
seventeen years after the shooting stopped, the actor who had played
Bud, the only son on Father Knows Best, expressed remorse. “I’m ashamed
I had any part of it,” Billy Gray said. “People felt warmly about the
show and that show did everybody a disservice.” Gray had come to see
the program as deceptive. “I felt that the show purported to be real
life, and it wasn’t. I regret that it was ever presented as a model to
live by.” And he added: “I think we were all well motivated but what we
did was run a hoax. We weren’t trying to, but that is what it was. Just
a hoax.”

I went to the John Glenn parade in downtown Washington on February 26,
1962, a week after he’d become the first American to circle the globe
in a space capsule. Glenn was a certified hero, and my school deemed
the parade a valid excuse for an absence. To me, a fifth grader, that
seemed like a good deal even when the weather turned out to be cold and
rainy.

For
the new and dazzling space age, America’s astronauts served as valiant
explorers who added to the elan of the Camelot mythos around the
presidential family. The Kennedys were sexy, exciting, modern
aristocrats who relied on deft wordsmiths to produce throbbing eloquent
speeches about freedom and democracy. The bearing was American regal,
melding the appeal of refined nobility and touch football. The media
image was damn-near storybook. Few Americans, and very few young people
of the era, were aware of the actual roles of JFK’s vaunted new
“special forces” dispatched to the Third World, where — below the media
radar — they targeted labor-union organizers and other assorted foes of
U.S.-backed oligarchies.

But a confrontation with the Soviet
Union materialized that could not be ignored. Eight months after the
Glenn parade, in tandem with Nikita Khrushchev, the president dragged
the world to a nuclear precipice. In late October 1962, Kennedy went on
national television and denounced “the Soviet military buildup on the
island of Cuba,” asserting that “a series of offensive missile sites is
now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” Speaking from the White
House, the president said: “We will not prematurely or unnecessarily
risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of
victory would be ashes in our mouth — but neither will we shrink from
that risk at any time it must be faced.”

Early in the next
autumn, President Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which
sent nuclear detonations underground. The treaty was an important
public health measure against radioactive fallout. Meanwhile, the
banishment of mushroom clouds made superpower preparations for blowing
up the world less visible. The new limits did nothing to interfere with
further development of nuclear arsenals.

Kennedy liked to talk
about vigor, and he epitomized it. Younger than Eisenhower by a full
generation, witty, with a suave wife and two adorable kids, he was
leading the way to open vistas. Store windows near Pennsylvania Avenue
displayed souvenir plates and other Washington knickknacks that
depicted the First Family — standard tourist paraphernalia, yet with a
lot more pizzazz than what Dwight and Mamie had generated.

A few
years after the Glenn parade, when I passed the same storefront windows
along blocks just east of the White House, the JFK glamour had gone
dusty, as if suspended in time, facing backward. I thought of a scene
from Great Expectations. The Kennedy era already seemed like the room
where Miss Havisham’s wedding cake had turned to ghastly cobwebs; in
Dickens’ words, “as if a feast had been in preparation when the house
and the clocks all stopped together.”

The clocks all seemed to
stop together on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. But after the
assassination, the gist of the reputed best-and-brightest remained in
top Cabinet positions. The distance from Dallas to the Gulf of Tonkin
was scarcely eight months as the calendar flew. And soon America’s
awesome scientific capabilities were trained on a country where
guerrilla fighters walked on the soles of sandals cut from old rubber
tires.

Growing up in a mass-marketed culture of hoax, the
baby-boom generation came of age in a warfare state. From Vietnam to
Iraq, that state was to wield its technological power with crazed
dedication to massive violence.

Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with
America’s Warfare State” was published this week. For more information,
go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com